by Pete Hamill
“Get ye in your room,” he ordered, “and stay there.”
“Da, I’m sixteen, I—”
“Now,” he said.
Cormac did as he was told, leaving the bedroom door open a few inches so that he could see what was happening. The main room was illuminated by only one candle and the low, dull fire of the hearth. Cormac’s heart was fluttery. Bran kept barking. Fergus placed one stool on top of another, leaving three blunt legs facing the roof. Those legs were now the height of his anvil, within reach of his hand. The knocking on the door was harder, muffled voices louder. Carefully, Fergus opened the door, holding Bran by his leather collar. Cormac glimpsed gaunt, pale faces and the flickering of torches.
“What do you want?” Fergus said.
“We want to search this house,” said a hard, burred voice. The speaker moved closer to Fergus, and Cormac could see the man: short, bull-necked, the apparent leader.
“Why?” Fergus said.
“We’ve reason to believe you’re a papist. A hidden Catholic. A Catholic with a Protestant mask.”
“You’re wrong,” Fergus said, and chuckled.
“You’re lying, mister,” the bull-necked man said.
“That, I’m not,” Fergus said, his voice darkening.
“We’ll see to that. We’re going to search this papist hole. Step aside.”
Cormac saw his father’s fingers curl around a leg of the stool. “If you take one step into this house,” Fergus said, “I’ll break your bloody head.”
The bull-necked man stared at Fergus for a long moment. Cormac knew what he was seeing: eyes as cold and gray as steel. Squatting in the darkness, Cormac reached under his bed for the length of iron he used for his exercises, and remembered the horse’s skull buried in the wall of this room long ago. He thought: Give me what I need, horse.
“We’ll see about that,” the bull-necked man said, as if by talking tough he could ease his own doubts. He turned slightly, eyes on Fergus but speaking into the torches. He said dramatically: “Billy?”
A taller man, younger, with a hat pulled tight over his eyebrows, stepped into the doorway to the side of the bull-necked man. He was nervously holding a pistol in his left hand, pointing the long silvered barrel at Fergus. Cormac’s father didn’t move.
“You’re breaking the law,” Fergus said calmly. “Just pointing that pistol at me is a crime.”
“ ’Tis a far worse crime to be a secret papist,” the bull-necked man said. “Your crime is treason.”
Now Cormac could see the pistol and the forearm but not the face. The man was stepping back to take aim. Cormac slipped out of the bedroom, gripping the iron bar, moving quietly along the wall toward the door. His father’s attention was focused on the men, and on controlling the angry Bran.
“You’re all very brave and sure,” Fergus said, “when you’re holding that gun on a man.”
“We’re following God’s orders, papist.”
“Sure, God wouldn’t have the likes of you pathetic bastards doing his work,” Fergus said.
Cormac thought: He must sense that I’m approaching the door, out of the sight of the men, but he won’t move his eyes my way. I’m sure he isn’t blinking.
“If you’ve naught to fear, let us in,” the bull-necked man said, a tremor of uncertainty in his voice. “We’ll know in two minutes if this house is fouled by the Whore of Babylon.”
“Now I understand,” Fergus said. “You’re an expert on whores.”
“Stand aside,” the man said angrily, “or you’re a dead man.”
“Ach, go home, will ye? Go home and hammer your wives—if you’re tough enough.”
“Billy!”
The unseen Billy cocked the hammer, and then Cormac swung the iron bar, pivoting on his left foot, hurling all his weight into the blow. Billy’s hand must have splintered into many pieces (Cormac thought) because he screamed and screamed, the way an injured baby screams, over and over, his voice fading into the darkness. The gun fell with a clattering sound, and Fergus placed a foot on it, gesturing to his son with an open hand without ever taking his eyes off the group of gaunt Christians. Cormac tossed him the iron bar. He squatted and with one blow smashed the pistol. Then he stood and kicked the pieces across the threshold. The men looked whiter and gaunter now, their eyes as tentative as the flames of their torches. The bull-necked man was wide-eyed. Out behind the others, Billy the gunman was whimpering.
“You can pick up those pieces, you bloody idiots,” Fergus O’Connor said. “They’ll fit right well now up your arses.”
Then he slammed the door shut, flipped the latch, released the furious Bran, winked at his son, and smiled.
“Thank you, lad,” he said.
As the enraged Bran barked and leaped and scraped paws against the door, they could hear God’s messengers murmuring and talking outside, their voices rising and falling like jangled music. They must have known (Cormac thought) that the house with its stone and plaster and slate roof was immune to fire from outside. But they didn’t sound interested in storming the doors to charge into the house with their torches. The sound of Billy’s voice moved above and through the other voices, a whimpering and groaning thread of pain. And then they went away.
Fergus O’Connor exhaled. So did his son. “They’ll be back,” the father said.
21.
But on this, Fergus O’Connor was wrong. The gaunt men didn’t come back. What came instead was the killer wind.
It arrived on the evening of December 27, 1739, while all the good Ulster Christians were still exulting over the birth of their various Christs. Father and son were reading by the light of candles. Fergus was again absorbed in The Drapier’s Letters, by the Dean. Cormac was reading the poems of Alexander Pope, borrowed from school before it closed for Christmas. He was copying some of Pope’s verses into a folio book, using a new reed pen and ink his father gave him as the season’s gift. In the margins of his precious green notebook, Cormac doodled faces he remembered (Robinson, or the gaunt night visitors) and images provoked by the poetry (hills and streams and ruined castles). From time to time, his father told him to listen to a few sentences from the Dean. Or asked his son to show him the sketches or recite some lines from Pope.
“If some of our more neighborly eejits ever saw that book of yours,” he said with a laugh, “they’d be sure it was written by the Pope in Rome.” He smiled. “And there was a Pope Alexander, you know. A right bastard he was, at that.”
Then, in the pause after talking, they could hear a whine, distant at first, thin, then widening and growing louder, and Bran was up and alert, growling in baritone counterpoint to the whine, baffled because there was not yet anything to smell. Fergus laid the Dean on the floor beside him, went to the top door, cracked it an inch, and then was shoved back two feet by the wind. He braced himself and slammed the door shut. They latched the shutters on the windows and gazed at the roof, which had begun to tremble.
“A gale,” Fergus said, trying to hide his alarm. “From the east. The worst I’ve ever heard.”
For an hour, Cormac imagined the wind coming all the way from Russia, across Germany and France, gathering ice in the Alps, adding more force over chilly England, driving with all its arctic strength to Ireland. Nothing could stop it. No king could demand it to halt, no soldier could shoot it. They heard Thunder whinnying in the stable, the high-pitched panic of a trapped animal. At first they did nothing, waiting for the wind to die. But the wind did not die. And then Fergus could stand it no more. He donned his heaviest coat and pulled a wool cap down tight upon his brow.
“Stay here,” he ordered.
“I’ll go with you.”
“No, you’ve got to be ready to find me if—”
And he was gone, with Cormac’s weight shoved against the double doors, pushing hard to latch them shut behind him. Cormac heard huge branches being torn from trees, thumping as they landed, and the deep, throaty sound of the wind under the high-pitched whine, and something
clattering off the roof: branches, slates, bricks. The wind drove down the chimney, forcing smoke into the room, and the windows shook and rattled and made cracking sounds as the punishing wind shifted and whipsawed and turned upon itself. Cormac no longer heard Thunder’s anguished voice. Bran paced, prowled, made nervous circles. Head up. Alert. Pausing to smell and listen at both the east door and the west.
Finally there was a hammering at the doors, and Cormac opened the inner one. His father’s face was raw and scraped. His hat was gone, his eyes wide. But he had Thunder by the harness. He unlatched the bottom door and tried pulling the horse into the house, urging him: “Come in, Thunder. Come with us. Come in.” In the roar and the whine, the great horse refused to cross the threshold. Cormac thought: This is not his world. His world is the barn and the fields and the forest. The horse backed up. Cormac joined his father, hauling on the reins. Useless. The wind roared past them into the house, extinguishing candles, knocking over pots and chairs and rattling the dishes on the sideboard.
“Hold him,” Fergus said, and while Cormac held the taut reins, his father rushed into the darkness past the whinnying, frantic Thunder.
Thunder winced, his eyes widened in pain, he made a twisting sound in his chest and rose with hooves pawing at the air, and then Cormac pulled hard on the reins, forcing the horse’s head down low, and with an iron stomping of hooves, a shuddering churning movement, the horse entered the dark human house. Father and son dropped the reins and hurled their weight against the doors until they closed. Fergus jammed the latches shut. Cormac could see dimly in the light of the hearth; he found a candle and lit it from an ember. An aura of light rose from the flame, and Cormac could see his father still at the door, his butt pressed against it, legs stiff, facing his muddied boots, until he straightened up, flattened his shoulders against the door, and slid to the floor.
“Glory be to God,” he said in Irish.
And then he laughed and switched to English.
“Glory be to bloody God.”
Cormac squatted to face him.
“Can I get you something, Da?”
“A spot of tea, Your Worship,” Fergus said, in an English accent.
“Righto, Your Lordship. But shall I first show the king to his bed?”
Fergus looked past his son at Thunder, stood up slowly, and they both laughed.
“How did you get him to come in?”
“Squeezed his balls until my hands hurt.”
He guffawed and so did his son. Thunder whinnied, as if demanding an explanation, or lamenting the condition of his balls. Bran looked baffled; the rules of the world had abruptly changed. The two humans bent over laughing until the tears came. All the while the wind was howling as it arrived from Siberia.
The wind howled all that night and through the next day. And when the wind began its retreat, the cold remained. For seven weeks, the temperatures stayed below zero. On the first day, father and son stepped outside and their eyes flooded and Cormac’s lashes stuck together. They found the stream frozen and the well a deep block of ice. They took Thunder with them, the two of them riding him, great clouds of steam rising from his nose and mouth. Everywhere, trees were uprooted. At least a dozen houses were smashed flat. The steeple of St. Edmund’s was jammed like a spear into an iced thicket twenty feet from the church, and there was no sign of the Rev. Robinson or anyone else. On the bald, distant hills they saw three frozen horses lying on their sides. When they returned home, Thunder bent easily under the doorframe.
The cold went on and on, and they set some routines: the dog and horse released each morning to relieve themselves, to be followed by Fergus and Cormac. The outhouse blew over on the first night of wind, so Da fashioned a harness to go around Cormac’s waist, to be strapped around an alder tree if the wind blew too fiercely. When Fergus gripped a tree, nothing could blow him over. They made jokes about shite freezing into cordwood before it left your arse and the miracle of pissing icicles.
They learned from a passing coach that the ink had frozen on the presses of the News-Letter. All schools were closed. Churches had locked their doors. In Belfast, ships were frozen to the quays. You could ride a horse across the iced surface of the River Lagan. When the weather warmed slightly in the third week, snow fell for eighteen hours, and began to melt the next day, and then the Siberian wind came howling more angrily than ever, as if showing its contempt for all of them, and the wet snow froze into giant hard-packed drifts. Six weeks into 1740, the odd traveler told them of destroyed crops and dead cattle and horses all over the north of Ireland. Within a week, food had begun to run out, because people had not been warned, had not heard Mary Morrigan speak about the bad times that were coming, had not understood the story of Joseph and his brothers. Fergus and Cormac O’Connor were among the lucky ones, for they had food. But as more reports of starvation came to them, Cormac began to feel guilty about having what might save the lives of others, and he told his father so.
“There’s nothing to be done,” Fergus said. “If we give out all we have, it’d be gone in two days. Then there’d be nobody left to bury the dead. Or tell their story.”
“But who will feed them?”
“When there’s this many starvin’, only a government can feed them. But they won’t. Not this lot. The whoremonger Chichesters are happy and warm in London, burning Irish logs in their fires and eating Irish beef. They know how great—for them—is the news from Ireland. The more Irishmen that die, son, the more land for the landlords when it’s over.”
He was right (Cormac thought), but his son was still angry, and struggling with guilt, and trying to bury both feelings in hard labor. They took axes to the stream and broke off large splinters of ice and filled pots with them and boiled them at the hearth for water. They rationed their food and the oats. Thunder gave off much heat, so they could be stingy with the turf, and at night the horse settled against the western wall, and Bran huddled beside him. As the stack of turf lowered and the merciless cold continued, they embraced Bran’s intelligence and soon all four of them huddled together in the nights, covered with coats and blankets.
Cormac used the green notebook as a diary and made sketches of what he saw when he rode Thunder through the cold. The notebook filled (his script now smaller to save space and often cruder because he was forced to write and draw with gloved hands) as more and more reports arrived about the general calamity and the indifference of London. Soon there was talk of famine. Just as there had been in Egypt and Israel. Corn stalks had been burned black by the great wind. Grass died everywhere, turning pastures the color of blood. Many shops in Belfast were closed because there was nothing to sell. Cormac wondered in his green notebook about the fate of the fishmonger and the butcher and about his friends and even the Rev. Robinson. The mud of Belfast must be like brick now. He was careful about some of his thoughts, since he did not want the notebook to turn into evidence. He did not, for example, record his feelings about the Rev. Robinson. Would the good reverend find a way to blame the Vatican for the Irish disaster? Of course. It was God’s will, wasn’t it? God’s harsh lesson about sin. Cormac wished God, if he did exist, would just show up and speak plainly.
One February day, it was warm again, and the snow melted away. But still, it did not end. That night the cold returned, driven by a brutal wind, freezing the earth into iron. Two mornings later, Cormac was riding west alone on Thunder, in search of wood to feed the forge and food to feed himself and his father, because at last they were running out of both. The frozen trees resisted his ax, and he settled for stray fallen branches that he lashed to the saddle. There was no food. Anywhere. Fields and woods were littered with the corpses of cows, wolves, sheep, and horses, some of them stripped of flesh, many of them wedged beneath fallen trees that had provided no true shelter. Some villages were blocked by red-coated soldiers who warned Cormac that everyone left alive was dying of fever and dysentery.
“There’s no water since the snow melted,” a soldier told him. “At
least they could melt the bloody snow. Now the wells are frozen like fecking rocks and the fecking streams are dry. ’Tis a pity. They’re even drinking piss.”
On the way home, Cormac saw the body of a coatless young girl in a stiff blue dress. She was about nine. Her face was black. A dark blue hand was bent across her brow. She was shoeless. He tried to imagine what had driven her into the cold without coat or shoes, and then imagined both being ripped from her corpse by foragers among the dead. And what had driven her into the cold at all? He imagined a brutal father or a dead family or the fear of ghosts in some ruined cottage. He wondered too where the Other People were and whether they were huddled together in the Otherworld for warmth the way he and his father and Thunder and Bran huddled each night in their house. That dead girl might have been looking desperately for the door to the Otherworld, where she would be warm in the place of emerald light.
Suddenly Cormac wanted the warmth of a woman. Tight and wet and warm in a cave that smelled of peat. There before him was a girl who would never be a woman, and the earth was so frozen that he couldn’t even bury her. He rode hard for home.
22.
Then, early one blue morning, Cormac came awake beside Thunder. He felt a dampness on his brow and he could see light through the cracks of the door and his breath didn’t make steam when he exhaled. Bran sensed the change too and started shaking himself, and then they were all up. Fergus said nothing, as if afraid this was an illusion. He opened the door, and Bran dashed outside, leaping and rolling, with Thunder after him, bumping the doorjamb like some large younger brother, shaking his great black body, testing the earth with his hooves. Fergus stood with a blanket draped over his shoulder. An immense brightness was coming from the sea. They heard a bird sing.
“We’ve come through it,” Fergus said.
And so they had.